


Beseeching Fires

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: And then lots of sexual touching, Canadian Shack, First Time, Force-Sensitive Finn, Friends to Lovers, Illness, Lots of non-sexual touching, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 03:24:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8128559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Finn and Poe crash-land in a cold climate. Finn gets sick, then gets better. Then they bang a lot. Come on, you guys know what a Canadian Shack is.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> This is a weird one. I don't think it's super compatible with my other stories in this fandom, but I was interested enough in it to post it--I'd never written them getting together before. Hope it satisfies--especially I hope it satisfies gloss, who enjoys this trope, and for whom I wrote it, and whose versions of these characters I trust and adore.

 

The pod's four propellers deploy when it hits atmo and gently lower it to the planet's surface. It's another indication, if one was needed, of the way the First Order thinks of its officers and of its soldiers: it's luxurious, roomy and padded, equipped with first-aid gear and water purification pills and firestarters and thermal blankets and cool lights and rations for days, and on a ship designed for a complement of up to eleven, there was only one of it.

Which is why, when it opens, the two people who roll out of it are cramped and gasping. They break from their embrace and lie on the moss side by side, taking deep, gulping breaths until the cold of the ground starts to seep through their clothes.

 

*

 

Before they do anything else, Poe doctors the transmitter to broadcast on all the Resistance frequencies and a few pirate ones Han told him about back in the day, which may or may not be active any longer. Finn reaches out with his Force-awareness to see if there's a particular direction they should walk in. Once the signals are cycling, Poe starts making the supplies into bundles they can carry and straps the transmitter to the top of his. “Anything?”

“Just trees and animals,” Finn says, sounding frustrated. “I'm not strong enough.” He's only been practicing for a few months.

“Don't worry about it,” Poe says, because worrying about it won't help, and also to keep from saying something like _You're strong enough for me,_ which doesn't even make sense. He tosses Finn the other bundle. “Let's start walking, try to keep the sun behind us.”

The moss is slightly crunchy underfoot, and the tall conifers don't let in much light. It smells nice here, sharp and clear and dry, but it's cold. Poe doesn't like the cold. He doesn't really see the point of it.

“If we see dead wood we should probably grab it,” Finn says. “In case we need to build a fire.”

“How do you know that? I always think of troopers as, I don't know, kinda indoorsy.”

“Survival simulations. You got points for picking up sticks. Indoorsy?”

“You ever actually build a fire?”

“No, my unit was focused on urban 'crowd control', mostly.” Poe can hear the fingerquotes around “crowd control” and they reassure him. When Finn talks about his life before, his voice sometimes takes on a matter-of-fact flatness totally at odds with his usual eagerness and ease. It's like he slips back to a time when he believed what he was saying, and Poe doesn't know what to do about it; usually he touches Finn's arm or kicks his ankle to remind him where they both are, and that seems to work.

He doesn't want to discourage Finn from talking about it—it's his life, all of it is his, he gets to decide when he talks about it and how he feels about it—but he also yearns to say _That part of it is over, you're never going back, they'll never own you._ He doesn't even know if Finn needs reassurance, but he wants to give it. “Well,” he says, “not much call for that around here.”

They come to the structures while there's still a little daylight left. One's just a lean-to, and a quick sniff reveals it as a latrine. The other, upslope, is larger, round and windowless, with a symbol neither of them recognize scrawled broadly on the door in yellow.

“I don't feel anyone inside,” Finn says under his breath. “But let's go easy.”

Poe calls out greetings in a few of his languages. There's no answer and no sound of motion. He prods at the door and stands back, knows without needing to check that Finn is covering him.

But there's no need. No one is here; no one has been here for a long time. The cool light Finn snaps on shows a thick layer of brown-gray dust on a pallet bed, a few boxes, a squat metal construction with a duct leading to the center of the roof. “What's that thing?”

“Wood-burning stove. Heating system. It's good news for us, it'll keep us warmer using less wood, if we're here for a while.”

“How do _you_ know that?”

“Couple of my neighbors had them, growing up. You don't really need them on Yavin 4, it never gets that cold, but people who came from cold places would ship them in.”

“Why?” Finn is prowling around the room. “This is really all there is to this place. Look, there's some boxed rations here, and a bottle of something. What's this thing?”

“Washtub, probably. They didn't trust it not to get cold?” Poe shrugged. “They felt like a place couldn't be home without one? People do things that don't make sense.”

“That's for damn sure.” Finn holds the light between them; it catches the planes of his face in unexpected ways and Poe briefly forgets everything he's ever known in those blue-touched curves and angles, like jewelry, like a constellation. “Can we stay here?” Finn is saying. “Why is it empty?”

“Some systems, yellow on the door like that means sickness. But I don't see any … traces.”

“Any bodies, you mean.”

“Yeah, bodies, or, you know, bodily fluids.” Signs that someone was too sick to control themselves before they died, vectors for infection. “And it's getting dark and cold. I think we'll be better here for one night than in the open, maybe tomorrow we'll check around some more.” He settles his bundle of supplies to the floor, raising a puff of dust. “Let's get some of that wood in here, and get a firestarter out, and I'll get this thing going.”

Finn sets up more cool lights around the edges of the shelter and at Poe's suggestion goes outside to shake the blankets out, beat them against a tree, in case of bugs. Poe's first efforts fill the room with smoke, but eventually he figures out the flue, and they start to warm up a little just as the bite of the night air descends. There's a honey bucket in the corner—it's even clean, a huge bonus and an argument in favor of the place being safe—and Poe enjoys Finn's expression as he explains what it's for.

They eat half a ration bar apiece—First Order ones taste identical to Resistance ones. “I didn't notice that before, but yeah, they do,” Finn says. “That's weird, right? When we get back, remind me to ask the General if I can do a little discreet investigation of our supplier and see if they're driving double.”

“Will do.” When they get back. He sets the volume on the transmitter to maximum, so it'll wake them if something comes through in the night.

There's no question whatsoever of who'll sleep where. They get under the blankets they found on the bed and pull up the thermal blankets, stiff and crinkly, on top of that, and Finn spoons up to Poe with only a little hesitation. “This okay?” he asks, chest to Poe's back and an arm around Poe's ribs.

“Yeah, fine.” It's the best thing that's ever happened to him and the happiest he's ever been. “You?”

“Yeah. Good. You're pretty warm.” His breath brushes the back of Poe's neck, and Poe revises his opinion: this is the _worst_ thing that's ever happened to him that didn't involve actual injury. Or Force torture. Or the death of someone he loved. You know what, he's back to his original position: this is great, and the only thing better would be--

 _Calm the fuck down, Dameron,_ he says in his head, _that is a separate topic that you are going to address another time, when survival is not involved and the man has a choice about being in bed with you._

“We didn't get to do this much,” Finn's saying. “You'd catch a case for it if you woke up in someone's bed and someone else stooled you out. Or sometimes the same person. But sometimes we'd do it anyway. Feels nice.”

“Let's go to sleep,” Poe says, because that gives him nineteen separate feelings and he isn't capable of dealing with any of them right now.

When they wake, it's fucking freezing. The stove's out. The room's smoky again. They both have to piss. The idea of getting out from under the blankets to deal with any of this is horrifying, and they both keep saying things like, “Okay, I'm really gonna do it,” and then nestling back in. Finn finally heaves himself up, scuttles over to the supplies, grabs something small, shoves it in his mouth and gets back into bed. “What is that?”

“Mouth cleanser tablet. My mouth tastes like shit.”

“Convenient,” Poe says, inexplicably charmed that Finn's first move was to clean his teeth. “Ugh, my turn, I guess,” and he puts his feet on the packed-dirt floor. Even in socks, it's a shock. He builds another fire—they'll need more kindling—and lights it, and puts his boots on, and heads downslope toward the latrine. It's no worse than the squat toilets back home, but the prevailing temperature has him wondering if it's possible to get frostbite on his balls.

They use the daylight hours to gather more wood. They put out the washtub in case it rains. Poe doesn't know how to read the weather here, doesn't know what the low continuous clouds and the slightly electrified smell of the air mean, but they _might_ mean that. They range further, the transmitter strapped clumsily to Poe's back and with Finn leaving trail markers so they can find the shelter again, but they walk for hours and there's nothing but the tall trees, the gray-berried undergrowth, the occasional rustle of a creature they can't see, their own footsteps and breath.

The looming trunks and the silence make Finn ill at ease. “Like Starkiller,” he says when Poe asks. “It even smells a little like it, once you got away from the built-up parts.”

“You're not there,” Poe says gently. “You made it out.” ( _You saved us all,_ but he doesn't say that because they've already established that Finn doesn't think of it that way. “I did what I did and I'm glad I did it,” he said once, frustrated and pacing around their quarters, “but I was just a part of what happened and I don't like it when people talk about it like I'm the only part. What about you guys, up there? What about Solo and Chewie and Rey? What about everybody here at base, gathering intel and doing the telemetry and fixing things and feeding people?”)

“I know that,” he says now, “but you know how it is.”

Poe does know how it is. He knows that at this point, hearing more things won't necessarily help, but keeping moving might and so might having another task to do. He says, “We need more kindling, the small stuff. I'll do the bending down and you carry?” and Finn nods with an effort that Poe can actually see.

They bring back all the wood they can, making multiple trips, but they can both tell that there isn't enough fuel to keep them warm for more than a few nights here and that they'll have to go farther afield. They didn't find water, either, and that's going to be a problem. The sky remains rainless and lowering as it darkens and they hold off lighting the stove as long as they can, wrapped in blankets while they eat sitting knee-to-knee.

“Be right back,” Finn says, standing up and adding his blanket to the one around Poe's shoulders.

“I'll get the fire going by the time you get back.” The larger sticks are slow to catch and the chimney's drawing badly, and it takes him a while. The room starts to warm, and he soaks it in, lets it drug him, uncramp his calves and shoulders and beat on his eyelids.

There's a soft sound from outside that could be anything, or nothing, but he's still the only one in the room.

It's ridiculous, Finn is grown, Poe's seen him handle without breaking a sweat attacks that would've put Poe on the ground, or in it. But they don't, really don't, know what's out there. He opens the door, and he must be more worked up than he realized, because he nearly pisses himself when something brushes his face: a snowflake, then another, fat slow drifting ones that are just starting to land without melting.

Theoretically, it's sort of pretty in the dim doorway light, calm and slow, if it weren't for the clammy patches the flakes make on the back of his neck and the knowledge that if it keeps up he and Finn will have additional problems. He heads toward the latrine, swinging the cool light till it lands on Finn, who's standing watching the snow.

“Hey, it's kinda nice, isn't--” he starts, and then stops, because Finn is _staring,_ not watching, and the snowflakes in front of him are hanging, equally motionless, in the air.

Poe feels a deep dislocation, a moment of no-time where everything is simply wrong. Then he collects himself. Non-falling snowflakes come under the heading of Weird Force Shit It's Better Not To Think About, but Finn standing like this is something he's seen in other people, though it doesn't usually take Poe that way.

“Hey,” he says again, not loud. “I'm gonna put my hand on your arm, and we're gonna walk back to the house.” He does the arm thing first, and Finn doesn't fling him off, so he applies a little pressure in the direction he wants them to go, and Finn comes with him, stiffly but docilely enough. Poe absolutely does not look back to see if the snowflakes have started falling again.

Inside, Poe sits Finn down on the bed and puts the blankets around his shoulders and kneels in front of him, unlaces his boots and swings his legs up onto the bed and covers him. He carries all of this out smoothly and slowly, with no sudden moves, announcing everything he's doing. When Finn is safely stowed Poe feels the dryness of his mouth for the first time, thinks of water, remembers the washtub all of a sudden and dashes out into the snow. He has to dig for it a bit, but brings it back three-quarters full and deposits it next to the stove.

“What's that,” Finn says from the bed.

“Our future water supply. How you feeling?”

“Shook.”

“Can I get in with you? Would that be--”

“It'd be good.”

So Poe gets in, behind him this time, out of an obscure feeling that if he lay in front he'd be taking comfort, not giving it. They go to sleep like that. In the morning, Finn stirs and stretches and seems like himself, says before Poe is really awake, “You're the rearguard this time.”

“I'm the _what?_ ”

“The one in the back.”

“Oh.” Poe adjusts to this. “I always called it the big spoon.”

“And the one in front is the little spoon?”

“Yeah, what'd you guys call it?”

“The front line,” Finn says, so matter-of-factly that Poe almost, _almost_ thinks Finn is fucking with him except that Finn doesn't do that. He supposes it's no different than pilots playing “popsicle or barbecue?” He says, “Lemme check the weather.”

It's still snowing, and there's a big drift right in front of the door, naturally. The wind's picked up, too, sending flurries into the shelter before he can get the door closed. “Sorry,” he says to Finn, who's gotten out of bed (taking a blanket with him) and is prodding the fire back to life.

“It's okay. I think it was just seeing it against the trees like that. Like the backdrop to that fight with Kylo Ren.” He says this calmly, like it didn't knock him into a Force-fueled panic. “Threw me off. How long was I standing there?”

“Not sure,” and that's when the transmitter starts to twitch and beep. Poe yelps and rushes over to it, looks around frantically for something to make a note on until Finn gets his attention by drawing a line with his finger in the dust.

LOCATION NOTED SENDING RECOVERY APPROX 8 STANDARD CONTINUE TRANSMIT, Poe writes on the floor with his fingertip. “I'm guessing they mean eight standard days. How many local?”

“About ten, these are a little shorter. We can do that,” Finn says, and immediately starts arranging the rations in piles to pace them out over ten days. _How are you so practical_ and _so charming,_ Poe thinks, _how is that even possible._ He adjusts the transmitter so it's only broadcasting on the frequency the response came from. Finn hands him his share of rations, and they wash them down with snowmelt.

Poe uses the washtub as a shovel to dig a path to the latrine and brings in another batch of clean snow for drinking water, and Finn rations out the wood in ten-day parcels as well—there really isn't enough of it, but maybe the snow will stop soon and they can try to find more. Then he sits down on the floor with a few chips of bark and starts drawing more lines in the dust between them, muttering the names of the ships and worlds that comprise part of the information they're bringing back. “Come here and help me with this,” he says to Poe. “If they're really planning to run press gangs on Champala they're gonna have to go through the Per Lupelo on their way back with two ships full of kids, and the gangs on Per Lupelo are friendly to us, or at least they were last I checked. So either they've switched sides, or the _Purifier_ 's actually making a different approach, or the press gang thing is fake and they're just passing through on their way to somewhere else. What else is over here?”

Poe gets down on the floor with him. “The hyperlanes run here and here,” he says, making the marks. “This way would get them to Arkania, which I think would be pretty into the we're crushing-you-for-your-own-good rhetoric actually, but they're not human so who knows if the Order would take them up on it. Raithal's over here too, that could be appealing, they used to train Imperial officers there. Lots of ex-Imperial shit over here, actually, I'm not surprised we found them sniffing around. This way is Mantessa, and we don't have any good intel from there that I know of. Maybe we should go. You wanna take another trip?”

“Let's get back from this one first. What do we know about Champala? They need anything that the Order might have? Or the other way around? What would make them turn?”

They come up with a few scenarios, mostly incompatible. Any of their ideas might fall to pieces when they get the information home—they just don't have enough data here to work with—but watching Finn think like this, thinking like this _with_ him, has become one of the great pleasures of Poe's life. It's like watching his flight path take shape: he knows it's going to lead to blood and fire and death and dust for someone, maybe him, maybe people who have a better right to live than he does, but the grace is there too, and the swoop, and the speed.

Their extrapolation gets punchier (“Maybe Mantessa's where they make whatever they put in that big jar Snoke lives in”) and slides into a pleasant, pointless wrangle about the species and body configuration of the shelter's original inhabitant. “I feel like at _least_ opposable thumbs,” Finn argues. “Look how the stove opens.”

“I don't know, I bet you could make it happen with a tentacle or a prehensile tail.” By the time Poe gets up to check if it's still snowing—it is—he realizes two things: it's dark outside, which means they've just spent an entire day together with nothing to do except talk and he didn't feel restless once, and Finn has wound down a lot, is sitting a little slumped now and looking at nothing again. “You feeling okay? We should eat something maybe.”

“Kinda out of it. And not that hungry. I might just get in bed, would that be bad?”

“Nothing to stay awake for. Go for it, I'll keep the fire going for a while.”

Next morning, Finn tries to sit up and gets so dizzy that he has to lie back down. In the cold room, his forehead is hot to Poe's wrist. Poe makes him drink water and tells him to stay in the blankets, and begins the process of digging through the first-aid kit and fighting down panic. It's a fever, he tells himself, people don't die from fevers all the time.

The kit does contain febrifuges, clearly labeled, two small packets of two pills each, and he brings one to Finn and drags the washtub over to the bed. Finn drinks from his hand, lower lip under Poe's thumb, and Poe wishes he could just enjoy it, the closeness and the softness, the trusting slope of Finn's neck.

What do you do for a fever, keep the person warm or try to cool them down? Feed them even if they don't want it? Water can't be bad, right? What if the fever is a symptom of something even worse? Finn says he doesn't know either, and if Poe could talk a little quieter, that would be good.

The snow stops around the middle of the day, lavender sky and orangish sun visible between the peaks of the trees when Poe steps outside. The air is crisp and calm. Snow hangs in clumps on tree branches and makes the lie of the land thick and smooth and strange. He redigs the path, refills the water tub, gathers a few more twigs and branches that came down in the storm. He's already sick of these tasks, of being caught and useless on this stupid planet while the war is happening elsewhere, of Finn too sick to talk to him. And his fingers and feet are numb.

The following day, Finn's worse, his skin dull and his responses to Poe's questions barely audible. One of the cool lights gutters out, which means the others probably don't have long. Poe makes sure Finn can reach the water tub and the honey bucket, straps on his blaster and cuts strips from one of the blankets to wrap around his hands. He says, “Be back soon, I'm just gonna go explore a little more, see if I can find anything that might help.”

He strikes out downslope. It's cloudy again—fuck, not more snow. He's counting on following his own tracks back to the shelter. Other prints run across his path, paws and hooves, small or at least small-footed creatures. They give him a sense of a planet full of uneasy motion, invisible and inacessible to him, and the wind picks up on that, nudging snow from the trees and blowing up his shirt. He's in that kind of mood where he really hopes someone or something will try to fuck with him, just _start_ something so he can finish it.

Or be finished. But that would leave Finn back at the shelter, sick and alone.

Poe wonders if and when his own symptoms will start up. A person can die anywhere, anytime, he's known that since long before the war, and most deaths are stupid, but he's always hoped his wouldn't be. It would really _suck_ to die of some random disease on a planet he doesn't even know the name of when he could at least have gone out blowing up another superweapon, supposing one of their idle fireside speculations was right and the First Order are building another one.

He walks until the sun reaches the point where he needs to turn around if he wants to make it back before full dark, and he sees no trace of sentient life, unless the creatures making the tracks—never anything bigger than the heel of his hand—have a sentience that he doesn't know about. Unless the trees are watching him, the wind listening. He grew up with people who _knew_ that was possible, and they were smart enough about other things that he's reluctant to fully discount it.

It kills him to turn around—what if there's someone or something they can use just over the next rise? But darkness is soaking up the daylight now and he makes his way back, coming in as quietly as he can in case Finn's sleeping, then stands over him for a long minute before even thawing his hands to make sure that yes, that really is the rise and fall of breath. Shallow breaths and hoarse, a little drool dried at the corner of his mouth.

Finn's eyes open. He starts up and says, “I'm fine, sir, just a little out of step, I'm ready for orders.” His attempt to sound brisk is underlaid with real panic, and Poe privately renews his commitment to find the people whose fault that is and put a crater where they're standing. He squats by the bed and says, feeling like an idiot, “Hey, Finn, it's me. It's Poe. We're on a mission for the Resistance. You're in this stupid hut thing with me on this terrible cold planet and we're waiting for the Resistance to come pick us up.”

He watches for signs that this is sinking in. Finn seems to focus a little, and he exhales, looking directly at Poe's face, and lies back.

Poe gives him another one of the febrifuge pills and more water, crumbles and wets a ration bar and feeds it to him a two-finger scoop at a time. He says, “Thanks,” seemingly lucid again. Poe rinses his hands, and the cold catches up with him, like it's all the way through him.

He gets under the blankets just as Finn starts to shake and can't stop. Poe holds him tight, trying to offer comfort, steadiness, something, without taking. The tremors run through both of them, then subside. “Poe?”

“Yeah, right here.”

“I have to piss, can you let me up?”

His voice sounds almost ordinary. But when he pushes the covers aside and tries to sit up, the shakes start again, his whole frame, his hands. He presses his face into them, shivering, shivering.

“I'll get you the bucket,” Poe says, sitting up and reaching.

“I can't piss in that.”

“That's what it's for, promise.”

“No,” Finn says miserably, “I mean I don't think I can--” He turns his trembling hands over, tries to undo his fly and obviously can't manage the clasp.

Poe takes a deep breath. “Okay if I help you?”

Finn just looks at him.

“It's not weird, I used to do it for Muran when he was drunk.” And they were fucking at the time, and then Muran died, but Poe opts not to mention any of this. Finn says, “Yeah, if you—yeah,” and Poe says, “It's no problem, I promise, I got you,” unwinding himself from the covers.

This is really not at all how it went in his fantasies, how he hoped it would go, but his own hands are steady. He can't help thinking Finn's cock is beautiful, thick and soft like weighted silk over his hand, but he restrains himself from even the suggestion of a caress. Steady, steady. Tucks Finn away again and trudges down the hill to empty the bucket even though it's cutting cold out, stands with steam rising from the bucket and from his own breath. He sucks down more air, lets his throat freeze and his chest ache and his toes cramp with the cold.

He stoops at the door to scrub his hands with snow. The symbol painted there flares palely in the moonlight.

Finn's curled on his side. The shakes have stopped, but he's breathing shallowly again and sweat stands out on his forehead. Poe sits on the edge of the bed to take his boots back off. “Buddy,” he says softly. “How you feeling?”

“Poe?”

“Yeah.”

“I feel like shit.”

“It'll pass.” Poe isn't sure that's true, but he tried, he really did, to infuse it with confidence.

“I don't--” His lips are cracked and pale, and move for a moment without sound. “So much,” he says, with emphasis, and then his eyes slide closed.

Poe's lips go numb. “Finn,” he tries to say with them, but they won't work, nothing works, nothing—

Then Finn inhales again, strained, but it's the sweetest sound. “You _ass,_ ” Poe says out loud, nauseated with relief. “So much _what,_ for fuck's sake?” Finn ignores him, sleeps. Poe gets in bed and lies waiting for the adrenaline in his system to break down and let him fucking rest, let him stop listening for Finn's breath and checking for his warmth.

In the morning, the blanket closest to them and Finn's clothes are drenched in what Poe sincerely hopes is sweat, and Finn's head is next to his, and Finn is looking at him like he's pretty confident about who he is. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Poe says, and again, “how you feeling?”

“Bad. But—not as bad.” He frowns. “How long was I sick for?”

“A few days.”

“Feels longer.”

 _To me too,_ Poe thinks. “Could you eat something?”

The rituals of the day, eating and lighting the stove and filling the washtub for water, don't piss him off nearly as much this time. “Anything happen I need to know about?” Finn asks, and Poe tells him about his venture into the woods: “That's about as exciting as it got.” Finn gathers himself to go outside, and comes in stamping the snow off his boots with real energy, but then gets dizzy and has to lie down again. “I smell,” he says from the bed. “I didn't realize it till I went out.”

“I can't smell you from here.” The shelter is a little ripe overall, maybe. Poe hasn't bathed either.

“I can smell me. It's gross. You think we could put that,” he gestures at the washtub, “on the stove and warm it up?”

“Uh,” Poe says. “I, uh, don't see any reason why not. Let me lift it up, though.”

Finn lets him—and why not, Finn has nothing to prove. They're quiet for a while, but it's not bad; Finn tests the water with a fingertip from time to time, and the side of the metal tub itself. At last he pronounces it warm enough and strips down.

Poe freely admits (at least to himself) that he fantasized about this too, as soon as he saw the washtub in the first place. It's nothing like the languorous show he imagined—for one thing, the shelter itself is chilly and there's no temptation to linger in nakedness. Finn splashes himself and makes faces at the cold, squats when another wave of dizziness hits, flicks water at Poe who's pretending to concentrate on making a spirit lamp out of the bottle of white liquor they found on the first day—all but two of their cool lights are out now, the bioluminescent bacteria having gorged themselves and lived out their lives and died.

Poe gets the wick twisted and the lamp lit—it'd make a good Mandalorean cocktail, too—and the lights leap, and the shadows change. Even with his healthy grace suspended, motions abrupt, stooping like a clumsy bird, Finn is beautiful, is perfect. The light is gentle with him, playful and stroking. Poe bites his lip and closes his eyes and tries to think about something else, like snow.

Finn steps out of the tub, dripping and frowning. “See, this is why sonics are better. Gimme that shirt, I guess. Fuck, I forgot this floor was dirt!” Poe cracks up, watching him pick up his muddy feet like a baby goat-lizard disgusted by its first taste of the rainy season. This isn't what he was expecting his day to be like. He was expecting—Poe lets himself say it now that it's almost definitely not happening--to need to dig a grave, and not be able to in the frozen ground.

“You be the little spoon again,” Finn says when they get in bed later. “I like it that way.”

“The front line?”

“Spoons are better.” They settle against each other. “Poe.”

“Mm.”

“Do you want me,” Finn says, “you know, like this,” and he kisses the back of Poe's neck.

There's a long pause.

“Yeah. I. Yeah, a lot, I, do you--”

“A lot too,” Finn says, and Poe can hear the smile in his voice. “Didn't I say?”

“Say when? No. No, definitely not, I would've remembered that.”

“I did, too. Last night, night before, whenever that was. I said I wanted you so much, and I do.” More kisses, gentle ones, Finn's stubble scratching a little.

“ _That's_ what you were saying? Fuck. All I heard was 'so much,' and then you passed out, I thought you were _dying.”_

“I thought I was dying too,” Finn says. “I wanted you to know.”

Oh. “Well, I know now.”

“Yeah. Turn around.” Poe does, and he straight-up moans as Finn kisses his mouth, kisses him endlessly, wetly, his lips still chapped, his tongue insistent, his breath warm when he says, “Been wanting this.”

“I've been wanting to suck your dick till you come your brains out down my throat,” Poe says, and _why,_ why is he like this, why does he have to escalate? Actually he knows why: it's all the days of carefulness and restraint breaking like a fever, it's the frustration pouring out, not sexual frustration but his rage at sickness and helplessness and pointlessness and weakness, all the things he can't do anything about. Also, it's no more than the truth. But it's definitely kicking it up a notch and if Finn--

Finn laughs, delighted. “That sounds great,” he says. “Kiss me some more first.”

They spend a good eighty percent of the next days in bed. They do keep it slow at first, because if Finn exerts himself too much he starts wheezing or shaking. This is a great reason for Poe to burrow under the blankets and kiss every inch of him, keep him still, suck him hard, stay with him till he comes. It's a great reason to lie together, Poe's cock in Finn's callused hand, Finn saying, “Like this?” then changing his grip and motion slightly, “How about that, c'mon, tell me, I want you to love it.” The problem, which is also not a problem, is that Poe loves _everything,_ every touch from Finn, every curse hissed into his ear, every kiss pressed to his damp skin, every fingermark bruise. Everything he's learned about his tastes from his years of fucking around and exhaustive--well--self-study has gone, swamped in the texture of Finn's neck, the musk of his crisp pubes, the swell of his fingers in Poe's mouth.

“Couple of times there,” Finn says in the dark, “I woke up and I thought I'd imagined you. Thought I was back in barracks. That's stupid, though, I _couldn't_ have imagined you then, not even you the first time I saw you.” His thumb crosses Poe's cheekbone, circles his earlobe, brushes back along his jaw where the beard is coming in thick now. “Fighting together, strategy, shooting the shit, everything we do now, no way could I have imagined any of that.”

“And this?” Poe asks, bending his fingers just slightly.

“Oh,” Finn says, and Poe feels smug, but then, “No, I could totally have imagined this. I've _done_ this. Well. Some of it, _shit,_ ease up, I'm trying to tell you something.”

“Go ahead,” Poe says, fingering him more and kissing him till he can't breathe.

“That's what I'm trying to say,” when he gets his mouth free again. “This is good, I love this, even though you're just showing off right now, I never wanna stop. But the other stuff, that's _just_ you, I mean it's just you and me. You understand?”

“Showing off, huh?”

“Do you know what I mean, or not?”

“Yeah,” Poe says, “I know what you mean,” and after another few breathless minutes he adds, “Me too.” Finn clenches hot around his fingers, drawing him deeper in.

Turns out First Order emergency supplies, deluxe as they are, don't run to lube. It takes them two days to decide they'll just have to deal with the friction and the increased warm-up time, for Finn's stamina—almost back to normal now—to keep him rising and falling as he rides Poe with a hand at his throat. After that they bathe, standing with their feet interlaced in the washtub, and wash their clothes, and get filthy again while the clothes dry.

They're sore and red-eyed and beard-burned--”I love this, will you keep it like this?” Poe says, rubbing his palm over Finn's face, and Finn says, “It itches, no promises. Let me be in you again,” and Poe says, “I gotta recover a little. Relax, we have plenty of time.”

“Three days is barely any time.”

Poe's hand stills on Finn's ass, where he's been gripping. “Wait, you don't want to do this after--”

“What? No, that's not—I just meant it won't be just us. There'll be people around, we'll have stuff to do. Don't be an asshole, of course I want to.”

The fuel runs out with a day and a half left before the supposed pickup and the snow still thick on the ground. “What the hell?” Finn demands. “We were on a schedule here.”

“I used two days' worth at once when you were sick, the worst day. Warm the place up.”

“What did you think was gonna happen when it ran out? I swear, Poe, you don't think ahead.” This is a complaint he's made before, when they're mapping out a mission or sometimes just looking down at their trays in the mess.

“I wasn't,” Poe said. “Thinking ahead. All that well. Look, you thought you were dying too, you said so.”

“But if I was dying, there wasn't any point in wasting warmth on me. You had to keep alive too.”

He says it like it's nothing. He says it without fingerquotes. He says it like there's anything, anything at all in the galaxy, that could make him not matter—like the way he matters is conditional, expedient. Although they're in each other's arms, Poe feels light-years from him. He says shortly, “I don't know, I thought it might help somehow, and I was kinda out of things to try.”

Finn kisses him, but it's a kiss to smooth things over, not a kiss to clear things up. They know each other, they move together, and they're strange to each other. Maybe this is how it is, how it will be. Maybe it'll change. “Guess we'll just have to stay under the blankets then,” Finn says, taking Poe by the hand and leading him irresistibly to the bed.

 

*

 

Nong Worasathit is a new Resistance recruit, but she's not a rookie pilot, and the little four-person craft lands sweetly between the tall trees. She wrinkles her nose at the snowflakes sifting lightly between her and the shelter, at the shelter itself, made of—is that _mud?_ Mud and parts of trees? Her own gracious and gleaming homeworld is gone forever, but she still has standards.

She checks the receiver at her belt: this is where the signal's coming from, all right. Checks the little holo in her pocket to make sure she'll know them when she sees them: two human men, one in a flight suit and one in a beat-up tan jacket, one focused and one laughing, standing close. Checks her blaster in case this is a trap of some kind. She knocks, calls out, and opens the door.

The smell, a mix of woodsmoke, sweat and something muskier and raunchier, hits her in the face. There's no light in the shelter at all, and it takes her eyes a minute to adjust—are they even in here? Her hand goes to her hip.

Yes, yes they are. They're in a pile of blankets in the corner, only their heads visible, but it's eminently clear that one has his arms around the other in the position that her people call—called—no, _call_ “slipper shells,” after a mollusk that likes to live stacked up, one's belly to the other's back. The room is freezing, and for one sickening moment she thinks she'll have to load their bodies onto the ship. But then one of them stirs, blinks, kisses the nape of the other one, who grunts and nestles back into him.

Nong sighs, and prepares to ruin the moment.

 


End file.
